Everything written about digital parenting assumes a home, parents, a family table. For a child in care, the home is multiple: the family, the foster carer, the residential team, the school, sometimes the judge. The questions families ask themselves (danger, regulation, the example being set) arise there too, complicated by the plurality of adults. Consistency between these adults then becomes the first educational tool, before any rule about the screens themselves.
The three questions families ask
In 2023, I co-facilitated, in the Ain department, a public meeting on digital parenting whose programme had been built from the questions of the families themselves, gathered beforehand. Three themes had emerged. Danger: is there a causal link between digital practices and isolation, violence, “addiction”? Regulation: forbid, limit, share, how far, how? And a third question, more rarely spoken aloud: is the parents’ modelling role weakened? In other words, are we still examples? These three questions are exactly those of professionals who exercise shared parenting, and the third is even more sensitive there than elsewhere.
Parenting with several pairs of hands
A teenager in care moves between systems of rules that ignore each other. At the foster carer’s, the phone is left in the hallway at nine in the evening; at the residential home, you keep it; at the mother’s, on weekends, everything is allowed, precisely because time together is rare and nobody wants to spend it in conflict; at school, the device is forbidden. The teenager is not fooled by these inconsistencies, they play with them, and we would be wrong to blame them: they do what every child does with divided adults. The answer is not to unify the rules by force, which is impossible and not always desirable, but to make screens an ordinary object of the co-education work: a point addressed in meetings between the team, the family and the foster carer, in the same way as schooling or health, with positions made explicit and a minimum of agreement on the essentials (night-time, protected contacts). A divergence explained to the teenager (“at your mother’s it’s different, and here is why it’s this way here”) does less damage than a silent contradiction.
The modelling role cannot be delegated
At the 2023 meeting, a doctor from a mother-and-child health service had shared her worry: children overexposed to screens arriving at consultations with language and drawing delays. The worry is well founded, and the answer that emerged from the discussions did not go through guilt-tripping: children reproduce what the adults who matter to them do. This is the modelling role, and it cannot be delegated to a set of rules. In an institution, the adults who matter are also the professionals: a team that demands from young people a disconnection it does not apply to itself loses the game before playing it. I often suggest that teams start the work on “young people’s screens” with a session on their own practices, based on the list of questions I published in the article « Culture, jeunesse et numérique » : concevoir des nouvelles modalités de projets culturels et éducatifs: how many times a day do I check my phone, do I consider myself the bearer of a “good culture”, have I ever co-constructed a project with young people. This detour through oneself is not a moral prerequisite, it is the condition of credible speech.
The images of children in care
One dimension of digital parenting remains almost absent from the guides: the images adults make of children. A film and media education professional once told me about her unease with parents who publish images of their children without asking them, that is, without respecting their children’s image, and suggested making this a subject of parent training. In child protection, the question hardens in both directions. On the one hand, publishing images of a child in care can put them in danger, and the bans on publication are strict, rightly so. On the other, the child has a right to their own images: those of their childhood, those they make, those of the workshops they take part in. I have seen projects where a committee of adults decided which photos made by young people deserved to appear in a book; the young people felt it as a dispossession, and they were right. The rule I apply to myself in workshops holds for the whole institution: what children make belongs to them; protection frames publication, it does not confiscate the heritage.
Consistency as care
People sometimes expect from me, in training, a doctrine on screens in institutions. I have none, and I am wary of those who do. What I observe, however, can be said in a few words: teenagers do better where adults talk to each other. A team that has put its practices and disagreements on the table, that has explained positions rather than reflexes, and that treats the phone as an object of shared life rather than as a foreign body, is already doing the essential work of shared digital parenting. The rest, the charters, the lockers, the schedules, is only the material translation of that consistency, and has never held without it.
